Once an Empire

In recent years empire studies have gone global. Accounts such as Peter Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World, as well as Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's Empire in World History, have sought to map the rise and fall of the British Empire in a global context by comparing it to other 'world' empires.¹ Their work has forced us to recognize that the British empire emerged, operated and collapsed within the context of global historical conditions and processes. All of this raises new and pressing questions for historians of British imperialism. Is it any longer sufficient to consider the empire as solely the product of a national history and the British nation state? How are we to understand the specificities of the British empire in a broader comparative or global frame?

These questions return us to a fundamental dilemma that has long haunted imperial historians. Does the contingent and variegated nature of the British empire thwart attempts to understand it systemically either on its own terms (as variously rooted in economics, politics or culture) or as part of a global structure or world system? From the late nineteenth century many imperial historians followed Seeley in suggesting that the empire was so contingent in formation that it appeared accidental, a view later challenged by Hobson and Lenin's insistence that imperialism was the product of a concerted economic project or system.² By the 1950s Robinson and Gallagher provided an alternative reading of the empire as a geo-political system coordinated from London by an official mind.³ After Said's Orientalism, culture, or more particularly theories of race and racism, became the new ground for conceiving of the British empire as a system.⁴ Yet here systemic views of imperialism - of the empire as 'one big thing' in Richard Price's phrase - began to collapse once more as the cultural turn challenged the view of empire as a monolith where power was centralized, finite and directed from center to periphery.⁵ How then is it now possible to reconstruct a view of empire as systemic?

John Darwin's The Empire Project: the Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830-1970 provides a response to these pressing questions in the field of imperial history. He suggests that the British empire was neither a product of the nation state nor a monolithic enterprise. Unlike his earlier work, which tended to view the rise and fall of the empire from a largely internalist perspective, his new and monumental book borrows Immanuel Wallerstein's term 'world system' (although not his theory relating to it) to describe how British power and influence became global in reach if not hegemonic in nature. At the heart of this British world system were a series of commercial and military projects that promoted integration and collaboration between its most powerful components - the British Isles, 'Greater India', the 'commercial republic' of the informal empire spawned by the City of London and the white-settler colonies or dominions. The seemingly consensual nature of this world system was belied by the tensions that developed within and between its component parts about the manner and meaning of their interconnection. It was also a world system decisively shaped and constrained by broader geopolitical forces beyond its control. Thus the British Empire's world system remained a never fully realized project and 'not a structure of global hegemony, holding in thrall the non-Western world' (p. 1).

Whereas histories of the so-called First and Second British Empires usually begin respectively in the seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, Darwin starts his story in the 1830s and 1840s. This was the moment of a geopolitical equilibrium favourable to British expansion. The defeat of China in the first Opium War, the decline of the Ottoman and Iranian empires, and the newly established independence of Latin American states from European imperial powers - all these opened up new sites for British investment. Neither the...